Vehicle health monitoring is a process by which sensor and other data describing a vehicle is retrieved and analyzed. Such analysis may facilitate an understanding of the viability of individual systems within the vehicle, or even the health of the vehicle as a whole. Vehicle health monitoring may also provide information that enables predictive maintenance of various components of the vehicle. For example, vehicle health monitoring may facilitate scheduling for both maintenance of parts and replacement of parts at the vehicle.
Present vehicle health monitoring systems for aircraft track a predetermined number of parameters. However, the amount of bandwidth available for tracking parameters is limited. This lack of bandwidth in turn limits the number of parameters that may be sampled, as well as the sampling rates of these parameters. In aircraft that may be monitored using hundreds of thousands of parameters, this limitation is problematic.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method and apparatus that take into account at least some of the issues discussed above, as well as other possible issues.